Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
March 28, 2024, 08:18:01 pm

ballp.it is the community forum for The F Plus.

You're only seeing part of the forum conversation. To see more, register for an account. This will give you read-only access to nearly all the forums.

Topic: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread  (Read 14732 times)

Lemon

  • Whatever happened to Freedom of Speech?
  • Administrator
  • ...IT'S NOW THE MASH!
  • 4,127
  • 421
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
So Charlie Brooker is responsible for quite a bit of television, because rather than producing a regularly scheduled BBC program where a guy yells at a television, why not create many different versions of that exact program? Five in a row and then a clip show afterwards!

Anyway, of note recently it's
  • Weekly Wipe
    Which is the same format as the other Wipe shows. A recap of the week's events, mostly as they relate to television, carried out by an angry man in his living room. But, seeing as how Charlie Brooker has money now, it's an angry man in a much nicer living room than earlier shows. Sometimes the commentary is perfect satire, but even when it's not, it's still pretty fun. Also, Weekly Wipe added a new segment where Brooker reads actual stupid comments from The Daily Mail. So that's fun.
    Here's S1E1 on YouTube.. I trust you can find the rest.
  • Black Mirror
    ...returned for a second series and is still goddamn excellent. If you didn't see the first series, it's a modern take on The Twilight Zone, where near-future technology plays an important role in the story. The second episode (15 Million Merits), takes place in a world where human life exists solely to earn Microsoft Points by riding an exercise bike. It is goddamn incredible. It's seriously one of the best episodes of anything.
    So the second series (a "series" in this case means three episodes about an hour in length, ala Sherlock) aired recently and I'm two in. It's even more bleak this time around where the first episode is about a woman coping with the death of her boyfriend and S2E2 is taking pretty much the same satirical stance as S1E1 except it's somehow even more nightmarish and terrible than a plot built around "Prime Minister Ordered To Have Sex With Pig". It's still fun though. Even though it's bleak and nihilistic and takes the stance that human life is a meaningless trifle, it still never loses sight of it's message. And sometimes it really can hit that hammer a little too hard, but I do like a show that's trying to say a thing. And that's always the case here.

Watch both things.

Lemon

  • Whatever happened to Freedom of Speech?
  • Administrator
  • ...IT'S NOW THE MASH!
  • 4,127
  • 421
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #1
Oh, and related: Has The Internet written any Barry Shitpeas/Philomena Cunk erotic fiction yet? That could either be very funny or very depressing.

Lemon

  • Whatever happened to Freedom of Speech?
  • Administrator
  • ...IT'S NOW THE MASH!
  • 4,127
  • 421
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #2
Also, after making this post, I found this interview.


It is, of course, an interview with an entertainer (probably in front of a room of "aspiring" entertainers) and therefore kind of bootlicking in nature. Still pretty good though. What makes it better is that they didn't have time at the end for Q&A, so you don't have to sit through "Hi, my name's Tristan and I'm a third year student of screenwriting and directing. What do you feel is the essence of art?"

Moriarty

  • Paid
    • 213
    • 48
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #3
I love the look on the interviewer's face when she's asking about the pig-fucking. And the way she just kind of keeps going "but did it really, really have to be pig-fucking?"

It also always amuses me when writers/comedians/etc talk about how they just kind of wandered into what they do, since that's pretty much how I ended up writing for a living myself. It makes me wonder what percentage of writers seriously had any inkling that they would be becoming writers more than five minutes before it happened.

fluffy

  • Paid
  • free hugs
  • 1,255
  • 68
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #4
I loved Black Mirror and I didn't know there was a second series. Thanks!

Delcat

  • Paid
  • 1,347
  • 17
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #5
Weekly Wipe
Lemon, March 11, 2013, 10:47:37 am

Oh God, I went a dark, dark place there before reading the description.

John Toast

  • The original Fat Voiceâ„¢
  • Ridiculist
  • Cover me in syrup. I'm delicious.
    • 108
    • 411
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #6
I love the Wipe he did on American television, both for his comprehensive commentary on US TV and for when he showed British TV to Americans. Watching a bunch of Americans react to Countdown is delightful. (Countdown is a British game show with cartoonishly low production values.)

He also did a section where he created his own reality TV show episode (or something to that effect) and it's brilliant. I mean I always knew reality TV was full of shit, but it's interesting to watch how the shit is made. That came out badly. Moving on.

I still need to watch Black Mirror. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd see if you plugged a TV cable into Stog's head.

fluffy

  • Paid
  • free hugs
  • 1,255
  • 68
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #7
I still haven't gotten around to watching series 2, but series 1 is great.  Episode 1 is basically an extrapolation of 4chan, 2 is an extrapolation of "gamification" and microtransaction nonsense, and 3 seemed kind of silly and unrealistic in a "why the hell would that be an issue" (even as an obvious metaphor for Facebook etc.) but the conversations that have erupted around Google Glass make it a lot more obviously brilliant than I originally gave it credit for.

fluffy

  • Paid
  • free hugs
  • 1,255
  • 68
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #8
S2E1 was amazing, especially in light of this piece of creepiness.

transatlanticalien

  • Paid
    • 109
    • 44
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #9
I've read TV Go Home and Screen Burn (a collection of his television reviews for the Guardian(?)) multiple times and I loved Screenwipe. Nathan Barley (a collaborative effort with Chris Morris) is also great
« Last Edit: April 16, 2013, 03:36:19 am by transatlanticalien »

chai tea latte

  • TheftBot is, simply put, a fully sentient robot for stealing automatic teller machines
  • Paid
  • (ATMs) from nearby convenience stores.
  • 5,773
  • -420
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #10
Just finished rewatching Black Mirror.

If you haven't sen it yet you really should.

cyclopeantrash

  • Aspergers Unto Death
  • Paid
  • High velocity man-hatred fired at everything
  • 1,698
  • 90
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #11
Lemon, March 11, 2013, 01:12:13 pm

Is it just me, or does Charlie look like a larval David Lynch in this interview?
« Last Edit: October 23, 2013, 05:13:11 pm by MicroMonster »

fluffy

  • Paid
  • free hugs
  • 1,255
  • 68
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #12
Is it just me, or does Charlie look like a larval David Lynch in his body of work?
MicroMonster, October 23, 2013, 05:11:20 pm
FTFY

Lemon

  • Whatever happened to Freedom of Speech?
  • Administrator
  • ...IT'S NOW THE MASH!
  • 4,127
  • 421
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #13
This has really been the first Charlie Brooker thing that I really thought was crap.


An arbitrary list of video game things because people who like video games tend to like it when people on television mention video games. The whole thing is presented in an "I Love The 90's" way with a lot of beyond-pointless interviews with famousish people saying "Oh yes, Space Invaders certainly was popular when it came out." Really idiotic and I turned it off, realized I had nothing else to watch, and then finished the thing because I was too lazy to go upstairs and work on other things.

Anyway, there's a piece at the end where this guy's saying that he has a child on the autism spectrum, and that he has his son play Minecraft and his son really loves Minecraft. And that's been helpful in his development because then he can play Minecraft and then probably play Minecraft some more.

Which really seems akin to "Hey alcoholic! You know a thing or two about booze, could you run my liquor store for me?"

Odd

  • Paid
    • 464
    • -5
Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread #14
This has really been the first Charlie Brooker thing that I really thought was crap.
Lemon, December 04, 2013, 01:16:34 am

Charlie Brooker can write really funny sour comments but the format of his shows lends itself to filler.
I would really enjoy his Videogame programs if he commented more on game plots and storytelling and a whole lot less about how socially relevant or innovative a game is. Maybe a funny deconstruction on how lots of modern cinematic videogames try to inspire sadness, melancholy, paternal feelings, etc.

On the broad scheme of things I don't care what videogame came up with what idea first.